The young Red Blood Cell and her friends return in the second volume of Cells at Work! Baby, and they have their hands as full as ever ensuring that the body they inhabit can keep on functioning normally. Also Red Blood Cell happens to stumble into every incident, but of course.
This volume contains chapters eight through to fifteen.
A CELL’S FIRST STEPS
Babies may look cute on the outside, but inside is a construction site. The blueprint? A human life! With the crucible of birth behind them, the baby’s cells have no time to lose tackling the challenges of life outside the womb. When you’re just a few pounds, a bump on the head causes panic, a vaccination is a mysterious invasion, and a mild cold can seem like a five-alarm fire! White Blood Cell has no shortage of enemies to fight, and Red Blood Cell will have to toughen up quick… a growing body is no place for crybabies!
A common theme throughout this volume of Cells at Work! Baby is Red Blood Cell thoughts towards one of her fellow cells, the red blood cell known as F. It’s the pretty typical situation of Red Blood Cell not believing that F cares for her, whilst F is being harsh but fair in an attempt to have Red Blood Cell become the best she can be. They do grate on each other’s nerves quite a bit, though, but everything tends to go back to the status quo in the end.
Although it is pretty easy to see why F gets so annoyed by Red Blood Cell. She seemingly just wanders around the body as she pleases, and almost always stumbles into whatever big incident the chapter happens to be focusing on. What a coincidence, eh?
On the subject of incidents, the cells have a few to overcome in this volume – from viral infections to suffocation. This Cells at Work! spin-off may have a generally lighter tone, but then you get a chapter like the fifteenth one, “Choking” that reminds you that yeah, the human body can be a really fragile thing. Especially a baby human body.
The worst consequence of any given incident is the body’s death, but actually presenting that as a possibility in a manga about a baby’s body feels kind of darker than anything that Cells at Work! Code Black can throw at us.
This is coming from the same manga that had Red Blood Cell getting bizarrely excited about defecation.
Besides that, though, Cells at Work! Baby does tend to maintain a lighter tone than the other Cells at Work! spin-offs. For the most part. Code Black certainly doesn’t appeal to everyone, but something like Baby might be worth looking into if you found enjoyment in the original Cells at Work!. The original series still does it best, but these spin-offs do have their charms.
Rory Muses 